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Locomotive Wiki:Manual of Style
The Manual of Style is a guideline designed to maintain consistency over the whole of Locomotive Wiki. Please read this guide, since it explains many aspects of editing the wiki, and will help you to avoid your contributions being changed greatly. Naming pages Pages should be named in sentence case, which is mainly for technical reasons. So use "Steam locomotive" rather than "Steam Locomotive". This is done because of the way MediaWiki software was developed around wikitext, and how titles should make wikitext links easy to use when linking ordinary text. So if "diesel locomotive" is in an article and you want to link to an article called "Diesel Locomotive" you would have to do this: diesel locomotive . Instead if the article were called "Diesel locomotive" you would only have to add [[]] around the text "diesel locomotive": diesel locomotive . This is possible because MediaWiki automatically capitalizes the first letter of all titles. *Electric locomotive (correct) Proper nouns should be capitalized as they would be in plain text: *Richard Trevithick (correct) *American Locomotive Company (correct) Pluralization Avoid it. The vast majority of articles should be singular nouns. In some rare cases a present participle (or a gerund) is used because that is the most common description of the subject. *Locomotive (correct) *Piston (correct) *Wheel (correct) *Streamlining (correct) Note that it makes no difference whether the object is only ever used in pairs; use the singular for linking and searching optimization. Parentheses Only disambiguated articles should contain parentheses; that is an article where its title is shared with other articles. There are two reasons for this: *Ease of use. Linking to, and finding, articles with parentheses may be more difficult. *Technical. MediaWiki makes it possible to use the pipe | to remove parenthesized words from links, e.g. diesel engine (disambiguation) can be shortened easily with diesel engine (disambiguation) to produce diesel engine. Special characters Avoid using special characters in titles. If unavoidable, contact an admin and explain why you think this is so. Seriously avoid uses characters such as these " # $ * + < > = @ [ ] \ / ^ ` { } | ~ because they are interpreted by browsers for different things. The # symbol is used to find headings (and other things) in articles; the / character is used to form a subpage (a subordinate page); double quotes " cause errors in scripting languages, such as JavaScript, which are part of MediaWiki software. So use single quotes ' , or omit them altogether, instead. Other special characters may even be removed by MediaWiki when creating the article. Files When naming images (before) you upload to the Wiki, please make the name humanly readable. For example, "IMG001.jpg" doesn't help anybody. A good practice is to name it after the exact object the photograph illustrates, e.g. naming a photo of a locomotive after its railroad (railway), model designation and number — in no particular order. Layout Lead section This is an introduction to the article, and summary of it. There should be no heading for this section and as such the should appear below it. Headings Headings, or sections, are used to break up an article and allow readers to find specific information more quickly. There is also a hierarchy to headings. For major sections use only level 2 headings, e.g. Level 2 , that in wikitext have two equal signs on either side (or visually are the biggest headings with a line underneath). Here's an ordered list of common major section headings: #History #Identification #Specifications #Trivia #See also #External links #References Omit which ever headings you don't need. More specific and or suitable headings may, of course, be used. Sub-headings may also be placed after a major section heading by using level 3 headings Level 3 that, in wikitext, have three equal signs on either side. This hierarchical process can continue to level 6, but going beyond level 4 is unnecessary and, at which point, you would probably like to rethink the article's structure. There are no common level 3 (and onwards) headings. Headings should be in sentence case, not title case. So any words after the first should be in lower case unless these are proper nouns: *Section heading (correct) *George Stephenson (correct) This is partly because these are sections, but also to make linking in wikitext easier. Even if you know the section heading, the capitalization would be hard to guess. This way it should be clear without the need to look it up. Headings should be kept as short as possible for much the same reason. Writing Generally, your writing should be kept as simple and concise as possible. However, that does not mean that you should treat readers poorly, but rather that you should avoid unnecessarily complex language and superfluous text. Spelling, grammar and terminology There is no site wide standard in regard to American English versus British English. A best practice would be to follow what is primarily used in the country from which the article's subject originates. However, within articles maintain consistency by not switching back and forth between American and British English. If the country of origin for the article's subject either does not have English as an official language or uses a less common dialect of English, the default is British English for European countries, but otherwise use American English. Technical limitations: There are exceptions to this that are, alas, numerous. One such example would be apostrophes ' since they conflict with wikitext. It's best to avoid single 'quoted' words when you are applying bold formatting. Placing four apostrophes around a word 'this' confuses MediaWiki and produces 'this'. (Plural possessives make fixing this problem doubtful: examples' = examples'.) Use double-quotes " instead, even if you usually use apostrophes for highlighting technical/slang/nicknames. For tech-savvy users, the HTML ' entity doesn't work because the Visual Editor replaces them with Unicode (substitutes the code with ' ). However, the typographically correct single quotes ‘ ‘ and ’ ’ do work, but are a pain to keep typing. See, . Structure Please keep paragraphs as short as possible, and if you change topic then change paragraph. This also means you should try to avoid starting paragraphs with a conjunction, e.g. and, but, however, if etc., instead start a paragraph with a subject, e.g. ''The locomotive was built between...'' Formatting :See for more information. Avoid formatting as much as possible. Reserve bold formatting for the first mention of the name of the article, such as in the introduction, and use italic formatting for names of locomotives or organizations. Emphasis, or stressed words, should not be used in articles. Note that you should never use underline formatting as it looks like a hyperlink when on the internet. Linking Please link to recurring terms the fewest number of times possible to avoid fouling the readability of an article. For short articles link to the first instance of the term where ever that might appear; for longer articles link to the term once in the introduction (if applicable) and once in the body; for very long articles link once in the introduction (if applicable) and once for every section. Red links Red links, or alternatively redlinks, are hyperlinks that appear red because they link to a page that has no text. These are useful as they show new users something that is needed. However, you shouldn't link to topics that are unlikely to be created on this wiki. Tables :See here for more information. Wikitext tables may be used in articles, but not excessively. If there's an article that needs many tables, then it may be a good idea to create a template for each of them. This will make the source more readable. When creating any tables in articles please use class="wikitable" like so: As this will maintain a consistent table style throughout the wiki. To show the styling, here's a more advanced table: